370 NATURAL SCIENCE [December 



A New Scientific Serial from Jamaica 



As we briefly announced last month (p. 351), Jamaica furnishes us 

 with one more promising infant in an over-populated world of 

 scientific literature ! To such a new-born child it can scarcely be 

 said, " weeping thou sat'st while all around thee smiled," for, while 

 the infant chuckles, distracted naturalists shed inky tears. It 

 might sound rude to say that all such babes must come to the 

 workhouse. To the house in which the specialist works sooner or 

 later they have to come. If every name in the atlas of the world 

 insists upon having its own separate representative in serial scientific 

 literature, the wasteful dissipation of energy will increase in a 

 lamentable degree. The diligence of the student will be more and 

 more exhausted in a vain attempt to garner all the scattered 

 fragments of information, which may or may not be of value, 

 concerning each strictly limited branch of enquiry. It is, therefore, 

 only with a moderate rapture of welcome that we can greet this 

 first number of the Annals of the Institute of Jamaica. 



The opening number is entirely devoted to a list of crustaceans. 

 Faunistic catalogues are not unfrequently a weary waste of mis- 

 applied industry. They often contain no guarantee whatever that 

 the author knows what he is writing about. When the identifica- 

 tions are original, they are as likely as not to be wrong ; when they 

 are borrowed, they are not ver}*- unlikely to be the endorsement of 

 some ancient error. Miss Eathbun's " List of the Decapod Crustacea 

 of Jamaica " stands on a different footing, because she happens to 

 combine with a very exact knowledge of the objects catalogued a 

 full and accurate acquaintance with the literature of the subject. 

 The list, therefore, is a critical list, and great confidence may be 

 placed in the names and synonyms and geographical distribution of 

 species which it records. But it also contains notes and descriptions 

 of independent importance. Some of these are quoted at full length, 

 though without marks of quotation, from earlier papers, while others 

 contain corrections of previously published opinions. Surely in the 

 interests of science the repetitions would have been better omitted, 

 and still more surely in the interests of science the corrections 

 would have better appeared in the Proceedings which published the 

 original statements. 



While placing the highest value on Miss Rathbun's knowledge 

 and acumen, we cannot always accept her decisions on points of 

 nomenclature. The name Stenorynclius scticomis (Herbst) should 

 stand, whether Slabber were right or wrong in stating that his 

 specimen came from the East Indies. He appears to have kept his 

 East and West Indian crabs together, and may have made some 

 confusion, and if not, as the present list shows, the same species of 



